I HAVE BEEN BUILDING WORLDS SINCE BEFORE I HAD WORDS FOR WHAT I WAS DOING.
I grew up in a small mountain town in Idaho, the kind of place where everyone knows your family name and sometimes decides what you’re worth before you ever open your mouth.
My family didn’t have the right name.
We didn’t have the right house.
We didn’t have much of anything.
And the town let me know it.
So I walked.
I would walk the streets for hours alone, inventing stories inside my head.
Whole worlds.
Kingdoms with histories I created as I went.
Characters who sometimes felt more real to me than the people I went to school with.
I didn’t know it then, but I was doing what writers do.
I was surviving by imagining.
A teacher saw something in me.
She read my writing and didn’t simply tell me, “Good job.”
She entered it in a national competition.
I won.
For a moment, I felt like maybe I could become something more than what the world around me had decided I was.
But life doesn’t always follow the story we expect.
I lost my way.
I dropped out of high school—not because I couldn’t do the work, but because the life surrounding me made school impossible.
I earned my GED.
I made mistakes.
I chose a technical career because I was terrified of being poor forever. I discovered I was good at it.
But something inside me was starving.
My creative soul.
Here’s what I didn’t do:
I never stopped imagining.
I played Dungeons & Dragons.
I built and painted Warhammer armies.
I rode motorcycles faster than I probably should have.
Eventually, I created a live entertainment company that brings dinosaurs and other characters to life at festivals, schools, and events.
Why dinosaurs?
Because I wanted to give other people the feeling I remember experiencing when I first watched Jurassic Park.
Wonder.
Joy.
That impossible-to-describe feeling in your chest when, for just a moment, something impossible feels real.
And through everything—
I wrote.
THEN I MET KELSEY.
I wrote about a girl who feels invisible in a small town.
A girl who survives by imagining.
A girl who has been told, in a thousand different ways, that she is less than everyone around her.
And then she discovers that she isn’t less.
She never was.
I gave Kelsey my birthday—December 3—because she’s me and she isn’t me.
And maybe that’s the truth about every fictional character who truly matters to the person who created them.
Sometimes I wish I had done it sooner.
But I also understand something now.
Every mistake.
Every street I walked.
Every imaginary kingdom.
Every time the real world wasn’t kind and I disappeared into one that was—
it all became part of the story.
It became Kelsey.
It became Aetheria.
It became The Guardian and The Seeker.
Maybe I couldn’t have written this book until I had lived enough life to understand what I wanted it to say.
WHAT I BELIEVE
I believe kindness is always the right answer.
I believe empathy is a superpower.
I believe the quietest people carry the deepest magic.
And I believe being overlooked doesn’t mean you have nothing worth seeing.
I’m proof.
Kristie Nixon
Boise, Idaho
